Blueprint of Pioneer Courthouse Square, 1980 (Soderstrom Architects)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Two months ago the Architectural Heritage Center opened a new exhibit (on view through July) devoted to the architecture and artistry of Will Martin, who of course is best known as the designer of Pioneer Courthouse Square.
Martin was no ordinary architect. Said by many to be a more talented artist than designer, he was a larger-than-life figure known for his flamboyant clothing (including a fedora and trademark cigar) and gregarious personality. But to win the Pioneer Courthouse Square design competition, Martin's firm, Martin, Soderstrom and Matteson, had to beat out a number of renowned architects and landscape architects, including Peter Eisenman and the great Lawrence Halprin (the latter of whose firm designed the Ira Keller Fountain, which New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable had called "the greatest open space since the Renaissance.") Martin's team, which also included a group of advisors such as landscape architect Doug Macy (of Walker Macy), sculptor Lee Kelly, writer Spencer Gill and artist Robert Reynolds, was the sole local finalist.
Born and raised in the Ozarks of rural Missouri, Martin headed west to attend the University of Oregon, where he earned a degree in 1957. Heading to Portland, he first worked for local firm Wolff & Zimmer (the forerunner of ZGF Architects) before starting his own practice in 1961. In 1966, he established the firm Martin and Soderstrom with David A. Soderstrom. In 1971, the firm became Martin, Soderstrom and Matteson, which dissolved in 1984. In 1985, just a year after Pioneer Courthouse Square's completion Martin and his 25-year-old son Eric died after a plane the elder Martin was piloting crashed into a wall of the Grand Canyon.
The AHC exhibit is a compelling journey through Martin's career as well as his creative mind, including not only the built projects he saw completed, such as the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University in Ashland as well as the Organ Grinder restaurant, not to mention some early commercial projects that were distinctly modern in style. What may be most memorable, though, are some of Martin's unbuilt designs, such as a proposal for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC: a spiral walkway that not only shares some similarities with Maya Lin's winning entry, but also prefigures the Oregon Vietnam Veterans Living Memorial in Portland, by Walker Macy.
Notebook self-portrait (Univ. Oregon) and a 1980 TV-interview screen capture (KOIN)
Recently I talked with Portland architect Cameron Hyde, a founding partner at Soderstrom Architects, the firm that emerged from Martin and Soderstrom after Martin's death. Hyde joined Martin's firm in 1978, two years before the Pioneer Courthouse Square design competition.
Portland Architecture: How did you wind up joining Martin and Soderstrom originally?
Cameron Hyde: I graduated from college in 1976, and initially a friend of mine and I built passive solar houses. But eventually I had to get a job. I worked for a couple local firms, but then I had two friends that worked at Martin, Soderstrom, Matteson, and they suggested I come work there. That was in '78 or '79. At that time, I thought it was a real coup on my part, because this was a firm doing pretty significant buildings: a lot of schools, a lot of university work. They kind of ran their office as three different studios: Will’s work, Dave Soderstrom's work and John Matteson’s work. They didn’t really comingle much. I did several projects with each of those principals. Will entered a few competitions in those days, but the square was the biggest one.
What do you recall about the competition and beating out these better-known candidates?
Even though the submission was anonymous, it was so obvious that this was a Portland firm: the craftsmanship and the materials and the way it was put together. We built a fantastic model in the office basement at 10th and Everett, an old Buddhist temple. We employed a lot of un-architectural techniques. We had the surrounding buildings etched on a printing plate and glued on these exotic hardwoods and had a nice hard wood model of the proposal. It just knocked people’s socks off. It was a beautiful model. It was a work of art.
Weren't the renderings a bit cheeky, too?
Oh yes. He had these fantasy vignettes—cartoons almost—in his renderings. If you look closely in the Pioneer Courthouse Square rendering, he’s got a bank being robbed on the corner. Someone was coming out with the money. A couple was making love in the corner. Life is going on around the square. It’s just some fantastic little stuff. And he always had himself in there. His little black straight-brimmed hat. Or his truck was in there. The model of the square was falling down and breaking on the truck
Three pages from Martin's sketchbook about the square (Soderstrom Architects)
You were the project manager once the project went forward. Could you talk a little bit about working with Martin day in and day out?
Will was a big-picture guy. He really couldn’t design a detail to save his life. He had a naïve sense of materials. Like simple things that I would, as a practical farm boy, know better: not to put terracotta under water, for example. I had to talk Will out of using terracotta in the water features. Will was adamant that he wanted the thing to last 100 years. That was his mantra. He didn’t have the faintest idea how to do that, but he meant that. Every time we butted heads, I had to say, 'Will, I think you wanted this to last 100 years. It’s not going to last 100 years if we do it this way.'"
How would you describe his talents and what he was like as a person?
Will, he was a Renaissance man. He really was. I think he was a far better artist than he was an architect. Not even close. He did botanical color drawings of wild plants and flowers that were amazing. To be brutally honest, his ego got really enormous after the square finished, to the point that after the opening ceremony—I think 1984—I quit the next day. I said, 'That’s it.'" But he also could be a lot of fun: very charismatic, and he really had style. I never once in my entire life saw Will Martin wear a tie. He had a wide-brimmed hat that he wore, and he always had a big cigar in his mouth. He had a black turtleneck and a black velveteen sport coat that he wore.
Architect Cameron Hyde today (Soderstrom Architects)
What about overcoming political opposition to the square, or to the idea of an open public space?
The square had political problems. Even before it was built, Bill Roberts and [Mayor] Frank Ivancie decided they didn’t want to have it built. Part of the business community wanted an enclosed structure where you paid to go into an aviary or a skating rink. Will said, 'No, it needs to be open to everybody.' He was very inclusive. He said, ‘Whomever is downtown needs to be able to walk through there.’ He kept holding up examples of European plazas. I went to Sienna, Italy to see the public square there, where they had the horse races. That was something Will was really taken with: having different things in the square as the seasons change. Different times of year different activities take over. It had to be open enough so the activities could be very flexible. I think it’s successful in that regard.
And fundraising? Selling bricks with people's names seems like a stroke of genius.
When there was a funding gap, they decided they were going to sell name bricks. So we invented a process for imprinting people’s names. The bricks were made in Klamath Falls. We made the slugs in lead for the printing press, and they pressed the names into the bricks before they fired them. They couldn’t kill the project because they had all these people personally invested. They didn’t get a lot of big donations but they got a lot of little ones.
I've always found it interesting that although Pioneer Courthouse Square and the Portland Building were completed within just over a year of each other, the Portland Building's postmodern style is often discussed, but not the similar postmodernism of PCS. How much did your team discuss the square as being postmodern?
Wood competition model of Pioneer Courthouse Square (University of Oregon)
What about the square having a postmodern style? It seemed for him more like sincere neo-historicism than postmodern caricature given his love of classical antiquity.
We talked about it all the time. Will was intrigued by postmodernism. On the heels of Pioneer Courthouse Square, we were talking with PSU about redoing the Stott Center. Will's design actually had arms and legs and feet scattered around: big giant feet and hands scattered around the periphery of the building. I thought, ‘That’s goofy. This is going to be dated in about five minutes.’
Could you talk about how some design aspects have been changed, like the purple tile on the fountain?
Will decided to put this purple tile in the fountain that wasn’t in the design competition entry. He got the idea in the shower: ‘We’re going to change this travertine to this purple tile.’ I said, ‘That’s just fucking ridiculous. It’s going to be hideous.’ You couldn’t talk him out of it. Bill Roberts and Frank Ivancie called it a purple piss pot. So three years after he was gone, Mark Bevens the project architect and I—the two of us who had sway on the square—we went to the people running the place. They were doing some renovations. We said, ‘Let’s get rid of that stuff.’ We did and it looks fantastic. It was purple checkerboard. It looks so much better now.
The fountain's original tile (George McMath) and today's (D. Coetzee)
I'm no expert, but I actually preferred the purple tile. It seemed more in keeping with the irreverence of the design and that postmodern style. But what about one of my favorite parts of design : the way the curving stairway forms an amphitheater with a ramp moving through it?
He got that idea from Arthur Erickson's Law Courts building in Vancouver, British Columbia, only that one is rectilinear while ours is curved. I used the largest beam compass to do that. Now it’s all done on computer. Everything’s designed off that center of the square.
What about the brick? Aside from the name inscriptions, could you talk about the patterning?
I spent quite a bit of time early on working out the brick patterns. Will wanted the pattern to look like a fine Persian carpet with intricacies that were subtle. We didn’t want to cut any brick. We figured it all out so the only thing we did was cut a brick in half. There are no pieces of brick at all. We spent quite a bit of time designing the field of that pattern. There are some subtleties. It was designed for trucks to drive over it. They’ve held up that way. It didn’t ever settle or crack. The brick’s just worn out. I don’t know where they’re going to find that color. Originally we were trying to blend that brick with the transit mall. The transit mall has since been replaced three or four times.
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